Talk:Genetic relationship (linguistics)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Confusion

from article: The term genealogical relationship is sometimes used to avoid confusion with the unrelated use of the term in biological genetics.

How to avoid confusion? - in genealogy is direct biological genetic relationship. It is even hard to imagine less proven and direct biological genetic relationship since :genealogy study and tracing of family lineages.

Both genetic and genealogical seem to be inappropriate terms, as language has proven to be a poor marker for genetics. This article should cite references.Jmldalton (talk) 00:45, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure you understand the concept. Genetic relationship in linguistics does not mean that two populations have a common ancestors. It means that their languages have a common ancestor. (e.g. African Americans speak a language that is related to German, but they have African genes) Which sources would you like to cite? You can cite virtually anything. A lot has been written on this. You know, when you say that German and English are genetically related, many people confuse this with biology, but biology is irrelevant here. How to avoide the confusion then? Use a term that is much less typically connected with biology and biogenetics - whence "genealogical".--Pet'usek ^{[petrdothrubisatgmaildotcom]} 15:38, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Merge proposals

Several articles have been proposed as targets of mergers into this article. I tend to agree with them, and would even suggest additional ones, but the real problem is that this article is confusing. A better ultimate article might be Genetic (linguistics), which surely also needs to merge with the content in this article. But the real point to me is that the first or second sentence in the lead has to make it very, very, very clear that "genetic" in this sense is entirely metaphorical. Linguistic "genetic" relationships have nothing whatsoever to do with genes, yet (see discussion above) the [ab]use of this term within linguistics is causing a great deal of confusion, seeming to imply to anyone who is not a linguist that actual biological descent is part of the equation. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:54, 13 May 2009 (UTC)